POST request using RCurl

Question

As a way of exploring how to make a package in R for the Denver RUG, I decided that it would be a fun little project to write an R wrapper around the datasciencetoolkit API.

Answer 1

I just wanted to point out that there must be an issue with passing a raw string via the postForm function. For example, if I use curl from the command line, I get the following:

    $ curl -d "Archbishop Huxley" "http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people
[{"gender":"u","first_name":"","title":"archbishop","surnames":"Huxley","start_index":0,"end_index":17,"matched_string":"Archbishop Huxley"}]

and in R I get

> api <- "http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/text2people"
> postForm(api, a="Archbishop Huxley")
[1] "[{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":44,\"end_index\":61,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop Huxley\"},{\"gender\":\"u\",\"first_name\":\"\",\"title\":\"archbishop\",\"surnames\":\"Huxley\",\"start_index\":88,\"end_index\":105,\"matched_string\":\"Archbishop Huxley\"}]"
attr(,"Content-Type")
                charset 
"text/html"     "utf-8" 

Note that it returns two elements in the JSON string and neither one matches on the start_index or end_index. Is this a problem with encoding or something?